The Explorers Read online

  By observing Cook, Banks had learned the importance of indulging curiosity. Then, as now, it was the only vehicle for pushing exploration to its absolute limit. He would later adopt this practice as his own, assuring his lasting fame as a naturalist, while also learning that the more he knew, the less he knew. Curiosity and knowledge are like fire and fuel: more knowledge does not satisfy curiosity, but stokes the flames, leading to an even greater need to know what lies over the horizon.

  7

  If the African Association was going to take the lead in exploring the continent’s interior, then Banks expected the job to be carried out with Cook-like thoroughness. The key to achieving this goal was to find a man with the late captain’s relentless desire to know the unknown.

  Word about the African Association made its way around London overnight. Within a week they were inundated by applications to lead the inaugural expedition. Banks ignored them all. He’d already chosen his man. Most preposterously, given how poorly the English fared in the recent War of Rebellion (as the Revolutionary War was known in Britain), Banks chose an American.

  John Ledyard possessed an abundance of refined curiosity—

  or at least seemed to. He was the son of a sea captain, and he liked it very much when people referred to him as “the first American explorer.”

  Ledyard’s life, like that of Banks, was an amazement. And as with Banks, the defining moment of Ledyard’s life up to 1788 had been while at sea with Captain Cook. In his early twenties he had dropped out of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and impulsively sailed to Gibraltar to enlist in the Royal Marines, with the goal of traveling around the world. In 1778, at age twenty-seven, Ledyard had been posted as a corporal on the legendary Resolution for Cook’s third and final voyage of exploration. Ledyard was a literate fellow, an unusual sort of behavior for a royal marine at the time. He kept a journal of his years at sea with Cook. The Admiralty confiscated his writings for national security reasons upon his return to London. But Ledyard rewrote his journal from memory after leaving the Royal Marines, particularly the events surrounding Cook’s murder. The resulting book, A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, became a best seller. Ledyard, like Burton and Speke eighty years later, soon became a famous explorer.

  The problem—the unscratched itch—was that Ledyard had not yet completed his voyage around the world. So he spent his royalties on a trip to Paris, where he hoped to raise funding for a ship to captain and a crew to lead. Ledyard was unsuccessful. He persisted. There was nothing particularly special about him beyond a barrel chest and a resolute desire to brave the unknown. He was smallish and unimaginative, prone to delusions of grandeur, lacking in discretion, and bound to do or say anything to draw attention to himself. When he chanced to meet an American admirer named Thomas Jefferson, who proposed a radically different sort of journey, Ledyard was all ears.

  The future president of the United States was something of an exploration aficionado. Not only did Jefferson possess a collection of world maps dating back to 1507, but among his holdings were copies of Cook’s personal journals. Jefferson, who was in Paris for a five-year diplomatic posting when he and Ledyard first met, was especially curious about the lands between North America’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Jefferson suggested to Ledyard a journey very similar to what he would propose to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark fifteen years later: a walk from one side of the Americas to the other. Ledyard was intrigued, but still thinking in terms of circumnavigation. He countered Jefferson’s plan with one of his own: a walk around the world. More a combination of walking and sailing, what Ledyard proposed was a journey that would begin in London, take him across Russia, have him sail the Bering Strait, then walk clear across North America to Washington, DC, before sailing on to London again. All he needed, Ledyard wrote to Jefferson, was the permission of Russia’s empress, Catherine the Great. If she allowed him to cross her vast nation unmolested, the journey could begin.

  Jefferson gingerly approached Russian officials in Paris to make a formal request. He was rebuffed. Catherine was suspicious that America had designs on the Siberian fur trade (true in Ledyard’s case). Describing Ledyard’s plan as “chimerical,” she refused her blessing.

  Ledyard went anyway.

  In the autumn of 1786 he set off on foot from London. He carried a small pack, little money, slept on floors and in pastures, and begged food. By January of the following year he had reached Stockholm. The Baltic Sea, that narrow inlet separating Scandinavia from northern Europe, typically freezes solid in the winter, when temperatures reach far below zero. Ledyard’s plan was to march across the ice, then follow the Gulf of Finland to St. Petersburg. All told, it would be a distance of 400 miles.

  But the weather was unusually warm that year. The Baltic didn’t freeze. Ledyard pressed on anyway, enduring a march north through Sweden, up above the Arctic Circle into Lapland, then down through Norway before finally crossing into Russia and reaching St. Petersburg at the onset of spring. He had traveled 1,200 miles in less than two months, an amazing pace for a journey in the dead of winter.

  Ledyard knew that he needed to maintain that speed to avoid spending the following winter in Siberia—an unexplored region where the temperatures were only slightly milder, and the thick forests were filled with bears and tigers. Alone, nearly penniless, living off the land, Ledyard pressed forward with his solitary march. By September 18, 1787, Ledyard was so far across Siberia and close to the Sea of Okhotsk that he found himself contemplating a future return to the area to make his fortune in the fur trade.

  Then the vast legacy of Captain Cook entered his life once again. Ledyard met up with Joseph Billings, a former able seaman on Resolution who now worked as a trader for the Russians. Billings pretended to befriend his old acquaintance, but then had him arrested under orders from a righteously enraged Catherine the Great. After walking more than 6,800 miles through some of the world’s most harsh terrain, Ledyard was turned around. Russian officials accused him of spying and marched him all the way back to the Polish border. Upon cutting his ropes to set him free, the Russians promised to hang Ledyard the instant he showed his face in Russia again.

  The smart thing for Ledyard to do would have been to scamper to his great admirer Jefferson and explain his side of the story. But Ledyard skipped Paris. Instead, he severed his relationship with Jefferson by turning to America’s former enemy for assistance, thinking Britain alone had the power to make his exploration dreams a reality. Ledyard made a beeline from the Polish border to London. And not just to any place in London, but to the epicenter of British exploration: Joseph Banks’s town house. Ledyard arrived in May 1788, ragged and destitute, begging relief even as he trumpeted his achievements. Three weeks later Banks presented Ledyard’s credentials to the African Association, proposing him as their new expedition leader. Despite Ledyard’s shortcomings, the American’s relationship to Cook and the epic nature of his undertakings won the day. Ledyard chose to see Africa as a continuation of his around-the-world trek rather than a deviation.

  There is a great possibility Ledyard would have been the first man to discover the sources of the Nile and Niger, as the Association hoped. He certainly had that dogged ability to put one foot in front of the other, morning after morning, no matter how awful the conditions. The world would still have his name on the tips of their tongues, if that were the case. If only in America, “Ledyard” might have a more epic ring than “Lewis and Clark.”

  But Ledyard never made it past Cairo. Somewhere during his journeys Ledyard changed. His deep curiosity was replaced by a sense of self-righteousness—characteristics that would one day define Burton. The pauper who once begged for food spent his Association stipend on fine shirts and griped about not being appreciated. He behaved with stunning entitlement and omniscience.

  That arrogance came back to haunt him. Six months after Banks and the African Association hired him to chart Africa, America’s firs
t Nile explorer was hunkered down in a Cairo lavatory with a case of traveler’s belly. He tried to treat it with a sulfurous substance known as vitriolic acid. Ledyard overdosed and began hemorrhaging. His death was miserable and humiliating, but quick. The British consul, recognizing that Ledyard was not English and was persona non grata with the Americans, hastily ordered him buried in an unmarked Cairo grave. He lies there still.

  Joseph Banks had contingencies for just that situation. Even as he’d trumpeted Ledyard as the future of British exploration, he’d made a secondary hire, just in case. The African Association’s other man was a courtier of King George III named Simon Lucas.

  Ledyard’s plan was to follow the Nile inland, then travel due west, to Timbuktu. Lucas’s plan was to penetrate Africa by crossing the Sahara from north to south, then head east to the Nile.

  Coincidentally, Lucas sallied forth just three weeks after Ledyard died. As a child, Barbary pirates had taken him prisoner. He endured years as a slave before being ransomed by the British. And while he had learned Arabic, and served as George III’s Arab interpreter, Lucas didn’t have an adventurous bone in his body. He quit his journey a few hundred miles after setting out, turning his camel around and racing north to the Mediterranean. The reasons he gave the African Association were thin, but his past traumas and political connections meant they didn’t press him. All knew of Lucas’s childhood, and his overwhelming fear of once again becoming the personal property of a Muslim warlord.

  The subsequent expedition fared only slightly better. Daniel Houghton traveled so far into the Mali region of western Africa that he nearly laid eyes on the Niger before being robbed of all his belongings by Muslim slavers. Naked, starving, and lacking protective shelter, Houghton was torn apart by hyenas, then had his bones picked clean by vultures.

  To say the least, the African Association was off to an inauspicious start. But Banks knew from personal experience that failures and setbacks are a vital part of exploration, bringing the goal one step closer each time.

  8

  Enter Lord Nelson. The vaunted British admiral destroyed Napoleon’s navy at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, and the British established a toehold in northern Africa. The African Association no longer had the search for the source to themselves. Between 1798 and 1856 an eclectic collection of self-funded loners, thrill seekers, and adventurous aristocrats trekked upriver, chasing the source. Most were British. Some were Dutch. Or French. One, the young Belgian heiress Alexandrine Tinné, was female. Some followed the Nile inland from Cairo; others cut the tangent across East Africa. Most died from disease, animal attack, or murder. None found the source. The holy grail of exploration became more exalted as the failures mounted, like summiting Everest would become a century hence.

  It was 1849 when a German adventurer named Johann Krapf first spotted snowcapped Mount Kenya in East Africa. A compatriot, Johannes Rebmann, discovered Mount Kilimanjaro, another nearby snowy peak. Both men were missionaries, and their discovery was soon published in a church magazine. However, the Royal Geographical Society in London quickly disparaged their findings, claiming that both peaks were in an equatorial region. And for snow to exist at the equator was clearly impossible.

  And yet, if such mountains did actually exist, they might just be Ptolemy’s legendary Mountains of the Moon.

  Jack Speke cared little for the source, and even less for the Mountains of the Moon. Dick Burton was more interested in re-creating his Mecca adventure by sneaking into the African city of Harar, which had never before been infiltrated by a Christian. Both men would later claim that the source of the Nile was never far from their thoughts, but nothing could have been farther from the truth when Speke arrived in Aden in September 1854.

  However, he was soon accepted as a member of Burton’s expedition (comprised of Burton, Speke, army officer and surveyor G. E. Herne, naval officer and artist William Stroyan, and a complement of native gun bearers and porters). Finally, the British political agent, Colonel Outram, duly gave his permission for the group to enter Africa—this despite his serious misgivings about their safety.

  On October 18, 1854, at 6:00 p.m., the group set sail for the Somali coast. The journey was supposed to take three days, but light winds and the Arab ship’s captain’s preference for anchoring at dusk and sailing only by daylight stretched the journey to nine. The grandeur of Africa was not immediately obvious to the British travelers when they finally reached the Somali coast, with their first port of Rakodah consisting of a small fort, several straw huts, and several other huts that had been burned to the ground by marauding tribes. And while Speke soon developed a taste for sour camel’s milk, which he thought tasted “sharp and rough, like labourer’s cider” and “the most delicious thing I ever drank,” he was also somewhat disappointed by Africa. “I had now seen the Somali shore and must confess I was much disappointed,” he wrote. “Hills and plains . . . were alike almost destitute of any vegetation; whilst not one animal or other living creature could be seen.”

  On the grand scale of things, the first Speke and Burton expedition was more of a minor probe than a grand journey. Upon getting settled in Somaliland, they split up and made cursory explorations of the interior. Burton reached Harar successfully,VI and immersed himself in learning the chastity and sexual rituals of the locals, along with developing a fondness for an opiate called khat. Speke, meanwhile, shot gazelle and other small game while reconnoitering the countryside. At the end of the six months, the entire party returned to Aden to regroup.

  At this point it was decided that they should attempt a more daring sort of exploration. What Burton had in mind was a journey inland to find the Mountains of the Moon, and the enduring fame that would come with finding the source of the Nile. He did not imagine the journey as a lark, nor take it lightly. Burton was just curious about its precise location, and theorized that with enough guts and determination he would be the first man to see it in person. Speke, obviously, thought nothing of standing right next to Burton when this monumental moment came to pass.

  This heightened level of curiosity is fascinating to behold.

  Each of these men had put his life at great risk during their solitary forays into Somaliland. Many a man would have happily sailed home to London and regaled their friends forevermore with tales of their adventurous wanderings through unexplored Africa. There certainly would be no harm in that. But these men were motivated by different things—Stroyan, for instance, was a proponent of the burgeoning art of photography, which would have made him one of the first men to take a picture of the beauty of the African sunrise. Yet it is clear they let their considerable curiosity overwhelm any fear of danger or death.

  It’s unfortunate that Stroyan never got to photograph that sunrise, for it might have been a most memorable achievement. Instead, he was slaughtered on a Somali beach on the night of April 19, 1855, when a spear was thrust into his heart.

  The night began quietly enough, with the expedition camped on the sand near Berbera. Dinner was served, and afterward, the men sat outside their tents drinking coffee and swapping stories, basking in the cool evening breeze blowing in off the Indian Ocean. It was almost idyllic in its setting, and the expedition was lulled into such a sense of security that they decided not to post sentries for the night.

  “At the usual hour we all turned in to sleep,” wrote Speke, “and silence reigned throughout the camp. A little after midnight, probably at one or two a.m., there suddenly arose a furious noise, as though the world were coming to an end. There was a terrible rush and hurry, then came sticks and stones, flying thick as hail, followed by a rapid discharge of firearms.”

  Some two hundred Somali tribesmen soon attacked the Burton Expedition’s camp on the beach near Berbera, slashing at the canvas tents and killing men where they slept. Herne’s pistol jammed early in the fighting, but he managed to flee down the beach to safety.

  Neither Burton nor Speke was as lucky.
As Burton swung his saber wildly at his attackers, a spear was thrust through his face. It passed from one side of his mouth and out the other cheek, knocking out two molars in the process. The fact that Burton managed to run down the beach with a very long spear sticking out both sides of his head is remarkable.

  How Speke survived is much more like a miracle. His five-shot Adams pistol ran out of bullets quickly, and he was soon set upon by their attackers. “In another instant I was on the ground with a dozen Somali on the top of me. The man I had endeavoured to shoot wrenched the pistol out of my hand, and the way the scoundrel handled me sent a creeping shudder all over me. I felt as if my hair stood on end; and, not knowing who my opponents were, I feared that they belonged to a tribe called Eesa, who are notorious, not only for their ferocity in fighting, but for the unmanly mutilations they delight in,” Speke wrote in his journal.

  Speke was stripped and held captive all night long. His guard was a single thin Somali, who held tight to the rope binding Speke’s wrists in front of his body. As morning dawned over the ocean, Speke had not yet been seriously hurt. On two occasions men had swung sabers at his torso, stopping the blades just an inch before they could slice into his flesh, then gleefully looking into the Englishman’s eyes for signs of terror. Speke had also been threatened with death because his lack of circumcision clearly showed he was not a Muslim, but for a time that seemed to have been just a bluff.